New on CTAN: tikz-net­work

Date: July 31, 2018 2:22:26 PM CEST

Jür­gen Hackl sub­mit­ted the
tikz-net­work
pack­age.
Ver­sion num­ber: 1.0
Li­cense type: gpl3+
Sum­mary de­scrip­tion: Draw net­works with TikZ
An­nounce­ment text:In re­cent years, com­plex net­work the­ory be­comes more and more pop­u­lar
within the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Be­sides a solid math­e­mat­i­cal base on
which these the­o­ries are built on, a vi­sual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the net­works
al­low com­mu­ni­cat­ing com­plex re­la­tion­ships to a broad au­di­ence.
Nowa­days, a va­ri­ety of great vi­su­al­iza­tion tools are avail­able, which
helps to struc­ture, fil­ter, ma­nip­u­late and of course to vi­su­al­ize the
net­works. How­ever, they come with some lim­i­ta­tions, in­clud­ing the need for
spe­cific soft­ware tools, dif­fi­cul­ties to em­bed the out­puts prop­erly in a
LaTeX file (e.g. font type, font size, ad­di­tional equa­tions and math
sym­bols needed,...) and chal­lenges in the post-pro­cess­ing of the graphs,
with­out re­run­ning the soft­ware tools again.
In or­der to over­come this is­sues, the pack­age **tikz-net­work*** was
cre­ated. Since LaTeX is a stan­dard for sci­en­tific pub­li­ca­tions and widely
used, there is a high chance that users are al­ready fa­mil­iar with the
syn­tax and the struc­ture of this lan­guage. Be­side LaTeX, no other soft­ware
tool is needed. The com­mands of **tikz-net­work** are kept sim­ple but al­low
a high con­trol over the pro­duced out­put. Post-pro­cess­ing of the net­work
(e.g. adding draw­ings, im­ages, texts, equa­tions,...) can be done eas­ily,
due to the com­pat­i­bil­ity with PGF/TikZ (Tan­tau 2015). Also, the em­bed­ding
of the net­work vi­su­al­iza­tion into the LaTeX-en­vi­ron­ment en­ables the use of
the fonts, font sizes, math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols, hy­per­links, ref­er­ences,...,
as used in the doc­u­ment. Ad­di­tional fea­tures are the three-di­men­sional
vi­su­al­iza­tion of (mul­ti­layer) net­works, and the com­pat­i­ble with other
lay­out and vi­su­al­iza­tion tools (e.g. igraph, netwrokx, QGIS, ...).
The pack­age's Cat­a­logue en­try can be viewed at
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/tikz-net­work
The pack­age's files them­selves can be in­spected at
http://mir­ror.ctan.org/graph­ics/pgf/con­trib/tikz-net­work Thanks for the up­load.
For the CTAN Team
Erik Braun
We are sup­ported by the TeX users groups.
Please join a users group; see http://www.tug.org/user­groups.html .

tikz-net­work – Draw net­works with TikZ

This pack­age al­lows the cre­ation of im­ages of com­plex net­works
that are seam­lessly in­te­grated into the un­der­ly­ing LaTeX files.